More Missionaries

Protestant missionaries have been expelled from the mainland of China, and have been officially discouraged in other parts of Asia and the Near East. Yet more U.S. Protestant missionaries are in the field today than ever before. Last week the National Council of Churches announced that 18,004 of them were serving overseas at the end of 1952--3,000 more than in 1950.

Africa and Latin America are supplanting Asia as prime Protestant mission targets. In 1938, according to the council's estimates, China stations accounted for about 28% of all U.S. Protestant missionaries abroad; the figure for China had dropped to 4 1/2% last year, with most of the remaining missionaries in Formosa and Hong Kong. In the same 14-year period, the percentage of U.S. missionaries assigned to Latin America and the West Indies rose from 16% to 27%, the percentage assigned to Africa (south of the Sahara) from 15% to 25%.

The three leading missionary denominations: the Methodists (with 1,527 missionaries and a mission budget of $9,107,987 last year), the northern Presbyterians (1,176 and $6,633,753) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (1,107 and $13,784,137).

A few nights after the Korean war began, Methodist Missionaries Bertha Smith, an evangelist, Helen Rosser, a nurse, and Nellie Dyer, a teacher, were arrested in Kaesong by North Korean Communists.

For the next three years they were moved from one camp to another--13 times in all.

Three weeks ago the three women were released and sent homeward via Moscow and Berlin. Each was given a tweed suit to wear, and it was in these that they arrived at New York's International Airport last week. Before they are assigned to new mission duties abroad, they will have "months" of rest at home: Evangelist Smith in Marshall, Mo., Nurse Rosser in Lynchburg, Va., and Teacher Dyer in Conway, Ark.

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